Newsflash WaPo…Drudge sends you TONS OF TRAFFIC!

Despite acknowledging the media business can be “brutal,” the Washington Post has yet to thank Drudge for the mass amount of traffic he sends them.

“I’ve linked to @washingtonpost over 10,000X in 25 years of doing DRUDGEREPORT. I currently give them 37% of their referral traffic, according to http://similarweb.com. It’s a brutal business. Not even a thank you. Instead: YOU’RE A RUSSIAN OPERATIVE!,” tweeted Drudge.

DrudgeReportArchives captures an image of the Drudge Report every two minutes, as it has for 16 years. We ran a script that checked the first update to Drudge Report after 9 a.m. on every day of the past decade, counting the number of times Drudge linked to Infowars, RT or Sputnik. Over that period, excluding the two standing links to Infowars, we tallied more than 1,000 links to those sites. Drudge started linking to Infowars in 2010. His first link to RT was that same year. Sputnik News wasn’t created until November 2014; Drudge’s first link to that site came later that month.

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On two days, we found four links to the three sites on the Drudge homepage. One was on March 3, 2015, when Drudge linked to articles about how supporters of Barack Obama endorsed Karl Marx for president (Infowars), emails sent from Sidney Blumenthal to Hillary Clinton (RT), about crime in Texas (Sputnik) and how the United States was sending the National Guard to Ukraine (Sputnik). The other day was Oct. 6, 2015. The four articles that day: Activists using drones to spy on an NSA facility (Sputnik), how the Islamic State might be sneaking across the Mexico border (Infowars), support for a “white privilege” tax by Clinton supporters (Infowars) and a rumor that a mass shooter in Oregon was taking psychoactive drugs (Infowars).

Bump’s smear on Drudge is a watered down version of Media Matters hit piece claiming the news aggregator was a pipeline for Kremlin propaganda. Left-wing hit machine Media Matters published perhaps one of its most erroneous “reports” yet — “How Matt Drudge became the pipeline for Russian propaganda“

Matt Gertz, a Senior Fellow at Media Matters, purports media titan Matt Drudge is a puppet for Russian president Vladimir Putin because the Drudge Report has linked to Kremlin-linked news publications 400 times since 2012. Now, 400 links may appear like a large number, yet a simple analysis reveals it’s a drop in the ocean compared to the massive volume of links published in the past four years. One doesn’t have to read the Drudge Report avidly to know the website publishes anywhere between 70-100 links daily. Such is a conservative estimate.

(Very) conservatively speaking, let’s assume the Drudge Report has published 60 links daily for the past four years.

The Gateway Pundit estimates The Drudge Report publishes 21900 links annually. Multiplying 21900 by four equals 87,600 links since 2012. Now we’ll add the 261 days that have past in 2017, bringing our total link average from 2012 to the present day to 101,460.

Media Matters shamelessly published a graphic detailing the volume of Kremlin-connected news outlets linked on the Drudge Report.

Keep in mind the news aggregator may link on average of 20,000 stories per year and yet, Gertz is ringing the alarm on the number of “Russian propaganda websites,” which barely receive 50 links in some years. If the premise of Gertz’s report is correct, the Drudge Report is far from being the pipeline for Russian propaganda.

One glaring item the Media Matters report fails to include is an analysis of Russian propaganda sites linked as the main headline story. As someone who has received multiple stories linked on the Drudge Report, there is a strong correlation between link placement and traffic. Stories placed closer to the top of the Drudge Report usually receive more traffic than those linked at the bottom.

Media Matters’ report is yet another desperate attempt to rehash a narrative that the political class and mainstream media use to nullify the 2016 presidential election and distract from the Democrats’ lacking policy agenda.

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